“Some people pooh-poohed the idea. They didn’t think it was going to work. They thought there was going to be a lot of violence, and so our committee met every weekand we said, O.K., what do we need to move this really large group of people from all over, to bring them in? We needed public relations. We needed to have a medical corps of nurses and doctors on hand. We needed to have Porta-Pottys, arrange transportation. Once we had charter buses, regular buses coming in—what’s going to happen to those? Where are people going to park?”

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Harry Belafonte

As a kid, there was not much I could aspire to, because the achievement of black people in spaces of power and rule and governance was not that evident, and therefore we were diminished in the way we thought we could access power and be part of the American fabric. So we who came back from this war having expectations and finding that there were none to be harvested were put upon to make a decision. We could accept the status quo as it was beginning to reveal itself with these oppressive laws still in place. Or, as had begun to appear on the horizon, stimulated by something Mahatma Gandhi of India had done, we could start this quest for social change by confronting the state a little differently. Let’s do it nonviolently, let’s use passive thinking applied to aggressive ideas, and perhaps we could overthrow the oppression by making it morally unacceptable.”

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The bus was on fire and was filling up with smoke. -Hank Thomas

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“Separate, but equal” drinking fountains in North Carolina, photographed by Elliott Erwitt in 1950.

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“When I first met Dr. King, I was 16, and he came to speak at our high school gathering. They have kids from all over the country come as representatives of their part of the country. So there were a couple hundred of us, and we would meet in groups and discuss politics, and we were discussingnonviolence because it was a Quaker-based group. And then Dr. King came and spoke, and I was just stunned, because this man was doing what we had talked about. They had just started the more publicly seen and known boycotts in Montgomery, and I just wept through the whole thing, because it made something real to me. It was real, but I hadn’t seen an example of it in my daily life, and there it was.”

Joan Baez

Baez first heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak when she was a high school student in California. His message of nonviolence resonated with Baez, who was raised a Quaker and whose pacifist views later made her a prominent voice in the movement to end the war in Vietnam. By the early 1960s, Baez had developed a friendship with King, traveling with him to civil rights demonstrations and giving concerts on the campuses of black colleges in the South. In 1966, Baez and King escorted black children to a recently desegregated school in Grenada, Miss. The effort drew mobs of angry white Southerners. Baez’s rendition of “We Shall Overcome” at the March on Washington was one of the event’s most memorable moments.

Winner of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007, Baez has been recording and performing for more than five decades and has lent her voice to humanitarian causes around the world.

Peter Yarrow

One third of the folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary, Yarrow is the songwriter behind “Puff, the Magic Dragon” and “Light One Candle.” He grew up in New York City and was committed to social justice from an early age. He and his cohort were invited by Harry Belafonte to sing at the March on Washington, where the group performed its covers of “If I Had a Hammer,” by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” by Bob Dylan.

Yarrow is the founder of Operation Respect, an organization committed to reducing school violence and bullying, and continues to pursue activism and advocacy through music.

Bond was one of a handful of students to study philosophy under Martin Luther King Jr. at Morehouse College. He was a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and served as its communications director. At the March on Washington, Bond collected transcripts of speeches and distributed them to the media.

Bond served in the Georgia state legislature for 20 years and was the NAACP’s chairman of the board from 1998 to 2010.

A young Brooklyn native without a drivers license, Horowitz laughed when Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington, asked her to be the event’s transportation director. Horowitz spent countless days in the spring and summer of 1963 working at the march’s headquarters on 130th Street in Harlem. She chartered buses, trains and planes, and got the New York City subway system to alter its schedule to accommodate the hordes of residents who would use the subway to reach bus-pickup locations on their way to Washington.

Horowitz, now retired, served as the political director for the American Federation of Teachers

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Jon Lewis was 23 when he was selected to be a featured speaker at the March on Washington. He was arrested scores of times during the civil rights movement and was badly beaten during a 1961 freedom ride protesting the segregation of interstate buses and at a 1965 march in Selma, Ala. Both events would prove to be turning points in the struggle for racial equality. At the time of the March on Washington, Lewis was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and today is the only living member of the Big Six, a group of influential 1960s civil rights leaders who planned and executed the march.

Lewis represents Georgia’s 5th Congressional District in the House of Representatives and is a member of the House’s powerful Ways and Means Committee.

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Rachel Robinson

Robinson and her husband Jackie, who broke Major League Baseball’s color line in 1947, were active members of the NAACP, one of several civil rights groups that came together at the March on Washington. The Robinsons held fundraisers at their Connecticut home to raise money for the march and other needs of the movement. In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. joined them for a jazz concert in their backyard. The Robinsons attended the March on Washington with their children, who were then 11, 13 and 15.

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Jackie with his son at the March on Washington

Rachel Robinson is the founder of the Jackie Robinson Foundation, which provides college scholarships to disadvantaged students of color.

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” Tell them the Dream “

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“We shall overcome”

“When we were going to the March on Washington, we didn’t know whether it was going to be violent, and we didn’t know if it was going to be a place where fear pervaded. The reality was, it was quite the opposite. Joyful doesn’t really describe it for me. It was like the physicalization of love. It was ecstatic perhaps, but it was not giddy and silly or ‘Let’s have a good time.’ It was a far deeper kind of joy. It went beyond joy. It was hard to describe, but it was the antithesis of fear, and it propelled us all into another channel in our lives.”

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” The march on Selma “

Less than three weeks after the peaceful, triumphant March on Washington, four Ku Klux Klan members planted a box of dynamite under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. The explosion that ripped through the building on Sept. 15, 1963, killed four young black girls—Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins (all 14 years old) and Denise McNair (11)—and injured 22 others, including Addie’s younger sister Sarah. Frank Dandridge’s photo of 12-year-old Sarah, with bandages covering her eyes, was a grim reminder that murderous opposition to the civil rights struggle remained.

Sarah Collins Rudolph, who never regained sight in her left eye and lives with her husband George not far from Birmingham, is still fighting for restitution for medical expenses and suffering at the hands of the Klan.

“It’s just such an awful, awful shame,” she says, “that it took that much violence for some people to finally wake up to what was happening in their own country.”

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“The lesson is never stop”

In many ways, the March on Washington was a culmination of actions from Dec. 1, 1955, to Aug. 28, 1963. We were on the dawn of a new day, and it had taken daylight a long time to come.

The essence of Dr. King’s speech was not the dream; it was the broken promise.

Dr. King said, Here we are a hundred years after 1863, and in Lincoln’s majestic shadows we stand. You promised, Congress, with the 13th and 14th Amendments, you promised. Yet here we stand today, with a broken promise, a “bounced check, marked insufficient funds.” We had been promised the accommodations of full citizenship, the right to vote. We had been promised equal protection under the law and equal opportunity. Yet in our quest for citizenship, the promise was broken.

The spirit at the march was that we were winning, and we were doing it together—blacks, whites—we were a multiracial social-justice coalition. That was before we had the public accommodation and before we had the right to vote, but those victories were in sight.

We had this sense that we were winning; we were rising up. We had overcome fear. That speech was an early indication that if we keep marching, if we keep pushing, we’re going to win this battle. It was a dawn-to-daylight speech, and we won.

Now we have the sense that we’re at dusk moving toward midnight. One thing we can learn from Dr. King is that the forces of equal protection should neither sleep nor slumber. We got the right to vote in 1865 after 200 years of slavery. By 1965 we got the Voting Rights Act, but in 2013 they eviscerated it. The struggle for democracy and equal protection will never be a past-tense discussion. There’s always a need for equal protection.

We’ve got to keep marching.

***

For those that were there, those not yet born……. I hope you take the time to relive the memories of that magical day, forge new one’s today and into the future!

I am humbled Chips…….Thank you so much for providing me this wonderful platform. I hope everyone takes the time to watch the testimonials……they are awe inspiring stories leading up to that day, and the days after.

wow LP This post is amazing! So many pictures and interviews. I especially like the one in color at the top of the post. Thanks so much and Chips – If you hadn’t of been here to cover this I don’t know how many people would have seen this. thank you!

ASTONISHING, astonishing post. OMG, just so revelatory, so beautiful, so full of the spirit and the hope of that era. I remember SNCC and I remember MLK and all the others. It changed my life and it made me aware that we could fashion a way FORWARD, if only we would believe in our strength. That is what led me to TRUST Barack Obama and to believe in his abilities to CHANGE and to LEAD. That is what keeps me involved – to SEE A BETTER DAY.

I LOVE how PBO led his children to view the MLK sculpture. I love how he presented them with the historical awe in their own way, in private and away from the crowds so they could fully understand his power.

LP, this post is absolutely brilliant and a true labor of love. Your narrative put everything that happened today in perspective and you gave us back the great heroes of our past in their own words. I am just so grateful to you for doing this. I was walking the streets of our Latino neighborhoods today, distributing leaflets for a Latino rally/picnic next Saturday and missed so much of what happened today. Caught up on some of the speeches and the photos, but your post just capped the day in a way that just reviewing it could not. Thank you for putting this together and for giving me back the beautiful faces of those who’ve devoted their whole loves to achieving justice and equality.

LP what a powerful post!!! Back when in ’63 I was not totally aware of the March until afterwards. Growing up in Kansas I was insulated from much that was going on. I grew up with all races. My father was president of a small Quaker College but we had students there from several countries in Africa, Korea, Japan, India also several Navajo’s. I was in college in CA before I realized not everyone grew up with many different cultures. I am thankful for my background and that I am alive with this President and being a part of this community. This has been a very emotional day, thank you all for what you have have brought here.

@LP, Just getting back from a day long meeting. Missed so much today. But then I come here and find this stunning summary and history. Thank you so much.

And Chips, thank you for the fabulous early posts. I will be reading all night!

Leaving for D.C., ya’ll, come Monday Night. Will be riding around the mall on a scooter. Don’t know the color yet. I wear glasses, a ‘fro, and I drive fast. If you spot me, holler Eve! Will be there all day Tuesday and Wednesday.

By the way, what’s CNN on TV is Don Lemon & Russell Simmons fussing about Don’s ig’nant-ass comments the other day in support of Bill O’Reilly’s bullshit prescription for black people’s problems. So now the newsman is the news.

This post is mindblowing and for a blog that is regularly sumptuous and informative, well, that is saying a lot. Thank you, lovelyplains.
Does anyone have any info about what we will see Wednesday? Forgive me if it has been listed and I missed it.

Hi Vicki, here is a website that will let you know about what’s happening Wed. Unfortunately I won’t be able to make the march, but I will be going down for the mid day part — I HAVE to, I can NOT miss this momentous occasion. I have been away from DC for almost 5 years and I have GOT to see President Obama!!

What a day of brilliance in every sense of the word. I love that you were there and that you have a beautiful photo taken with your great governor. You tweeted so many great photos, so THANK YOU for being there and sharing your incredible experience. AMEN!

Donna, I’m stilled stunned by your photo with Gov. O’Malley and his response to you. What a fantastic thing to have happen and on a day like today. I don’t think I could get my feet to touch the ground if I had a day like you did. You are one amazing woman. Congratulations.

I am not a writer – especially when I’m emotional. Today was a day of emotion. In 1963, I was 14. Having been born in Washington, DC and very much sheltered by my parents, I had NO knowledge of racial issues. We just were never taken to places where we would be denied entrance and race was not discussed in my house. When I was born, we lived in a black neighborhood. Later when we moved to another neighborhood, white folks moved away quick fast and in a hurry. I say this to say that I knew absolutely nothing about the importance of the March on Washington in 1963. My mother had died in 1962, so I pretty much was a wreck, mentally. Anyway, as an adult I became politically active and so there was no way I was going to miss the March today. I live in Montgomery County Maryland, which is a suburb of DC. I don’t need to say anything about the speeches, because this site has put so many of them up for everyone to hear. I don’t know if people could hear the crowd on the TV. But let me say that when AG Holder came to the mic, the applause was loud and sustained. I couldn’t help but think about how the Emo-progs dissed him over and over. The man is a giant in word and deed. Of course Rep John Lewis was the conscience of the March. Talk about breaking your heart when he talked of his beating, but filling your heart with pride when spoke of never quitting. It was truly a great day. I am hopeful about Wednesday. My husband may not be able to go, but I may go by myself if I have to.

Your story is my story. Growing up in DC we were definitely sheltered from all the discrimination. I remember wanting to go to the March and my grandmother telling me and my cousins that we might get hurt if you go down there so we had to watch it on that black and white TV.

Thank you Sabreen, for being there and reporting back. It was so emotional just watching and listening on TV. Just knowing all the emotion of being there. Especially listening to all those wonderful speakers. Seeing AG Holder. John Lewis is such an icon. Thank you for sharing your experience.

Sabreen — I live in Mont. County!! I plan on going for the mid-day speeches on Wed. Born and raised here, I have been away for 4.5 years. I am so glad to be back just in time for this momentous occasion.

Meta, I come from a background of comfort and safety, so I can’t even imagine what it is like to have to go through what blacks have to go through, just by being black. I hate that I have to see the struggle on this man’s face, and you can see it in MLK’s face — the worry and the knowing that he would most likely die very soon.
I lived in Dallas TX for 4.5 years, and I had my two Obama bumper stickers. I had people flip me off for no reason, rush up on my bumper for no reason, try to cut me off for no reason — although I’m sure I can guess why. I am fortunate that I can take off the bumper sticker and I am safe once again. Rep. Lewis and the millions of others that have struggled with racial injustice and inequality can not take their skin off. I recently visited Memphis and I saw the hotel where King was assassinated, it was chilling.

No surprise but definitely disappointment, hf2.
The good news is that last election cycle candidates who got All 3 of the NY newspapers: NYTimes, NYPost & Daily News….wait for it….LOST! David Yassky, for example. Who was given as a consolation prize by Bloomberg the head job at the taxi and Limo Dept.
Where he is no doubt doing as little as possible for 99% of us.

Some tremendous history here, Chips. Takes me back. My first awareness of John Lewis was when I was a student in a Catholic monastic seminary and an older seminary student, a year from ordination from the priesthood, who was active in SNCC and did voter registration in the South, showed me a SNCC press release describing the attack on the Selma bridge and described the wounds of John Lewis. It made a huge impression on me.

Great, great, post, LovelyPlains! Brings back so many memories, of both joy and incredible sadness, during my teen years. I especially remember so many brilliant people who were lost in the cause or no longer with us. I am thankful that John Lewis, Harry Belafonte, Julian Bond, and others, are still around to share their memories. So far, my only regret is that no one has paid tribute to the great A. Philip Randolph, and his brilliant assistant, Bayard Rustin, for originating and organizing the 1963 March On Washington, which gave Dr. King the national exposure to emerge as the charismatic leader of the Civil Rights movement. The Black Freedom struggle has a very long and honorable history, with brilliant and courageous leaders, both men and women, that goes back centuries.

God, did anybody read that disgusting article by Kathleen Parker @washingtonpost, suggesting that the president’s extemporaneous remarks about race may have caused the murder in Oklahoma?

I left this site to check on Smarty Pants, and happened to see this article referenced on her sidebar.
I wrote a comment. There is a grammatical mistake, which I hate, because other comments like to dismiss the thoughts of others when there are grammatical or punctuation errors.

If you can stand it, please read it and respond to the post and Ms. Parker.

Every action everywhere is because there is a blah guy in the white house. The white media has serious problems with its reality – the President continues to ignore them – and the only reason they preach their lies – is to attract attention. best example Palin – this one is about 4th or 5th on the list.

Interesting (or not) there are many women on the list of those who so want the President to notice them.

I head back to D.C. for the semester, as a graduate, to do important work for our county and particularly the African American community with a certain well-known organization. I won’t mention it here, as this blog is public. But if you want to know, DM me on Twitter. :D

I hope I get to see PBO speak on the 28th. ^_^

Donna those were awesome pictures you posted today. I’m sooo jealous that you had a moment with our magnificent Governor O’Malley. :)

Collegekay, this is so exciting! Congratulations! The best part of this family is knowing our future is in the hands of smart, talented, gifted, caring and giving young people. You are an inspiration. Know that you will always have the support and prayers of all of us in my generation. God bless you in your new adventure.

Congratulations Collegekay! It’s so gratifying, especially for an oldie like me, to see young people like you deciding to pursue jobs aimed at helping people and our country. You exemplify what W.E.B. DuBois and the Rev. Alexander Crummell had in mind when they talked about the College educated “Talented Tenth” who would focus on racial uplift instead of focusing on making tons of money.